if we never meet again
by sea salt
Summary: 5.22 Coda. Dean wants an ending, but there were never really any guarantees.


**Title:** if we never meet again**  
Genre:** Gen, Angst**  
Rating:** R (language)**  
Characters:** Dean, Sam, Castiel, Bobby**  
Word Count:** 3069**  
Summary:** 5.22 Coda. Dean wants an ending, but there were never really any guarantees.

* * *

if we never meet again

* * *

Dean wants an ending, for the world to crumble away into the black light of oblivion while he stands apart and watches it happen. He wants it to be a choice, to drop the red curtain himself and to scribble out all post-script, to throw back his head and laugh, say _fuck it, fuck you_ to Heaven and Hell and every existing thing there is, to dig his nails in and rip the entire universe apart at the seams.

Instead Dean is given a hot meal and a cold beer, condensation dripping from his fingertips and Lisa's naïve, worried gaze. She asks him what happened, are you okay, and Dean grins and lies to her again and again, but she touches his hand, runs her thumb back and forth across his knuckles, and doesn't notice.

He sleeps on her couch because Lisa's warm skin and dark eyes make him shudder and want to crawl away, but he promised Sam, he _promised_, and he can't do this but he can't leave it behind.

He dreams of Sam when he was kid, floppy hair and awkward long limbs, of his Mother's soft face and the scratchy feel of his Father's beard against his cheek. He dreams of running his fingers along the Impala's sleek black surface, Bobby peering out at him from under the rim of one of his fuck ugly hats and of Castiel, standing with his arms hanging straight at his sides and yellow sparks raining down around him.

He dreams of the end of the world, and there is no bang, no whimper, no fire from the sky or snake-eyed smiles from Lucifer. There is, somehow, only light, and Dean wakes up and vomits all over Lisa's clean, hardwood floor.

* * *

Sam gives everything and wants nothing. He can feel the cold burn of Lucifer coiled tight within him, raging and tearing and pounding to be free from the cage of Sam's meat and the bars around them both, and Sam can only smile and be satisfied. There is no light, no sound, no physical sensation. There is only the scent of sulphur and something alive and smouldering (Michael is, after all, nestled in beside him), and they are trapped in the contained vacuum of something like Hell, but not.

There is no end, can't be an end, because Sam has died twice before and this has no finality to it. Michael screams that this is wrong, a mistake, it cannot happen, and Sam simply tells him _it did_, and has no choice but to listen to him wail.

Sam thinks that he should be going insane, but there is only acceptance, calm, and the hum of Lucifer beneath his skin which grows less distracting over time. He remembers paved roads, cheap coffee, the long stretch of the horizon beyond the Impala's nicked dashboard and his brother, one hand on the wheel and the other dangling out the open window. The image lingers behind his eyes, and Sam is glad.

Lucifer stirs and snarls, curls himself along Sam's spine and whispers _you're trapped here too, Sam. You're trapped here with __**us**__._

Sam can only laugh, relieved, and prays to God out loud that his brother will be at peace.

(One day a man finds himself lying on a dirt road with dust in his hair and wedged beneath his fingernails. There is a rock pressing hard into the middle of his back and he rolls onto his stomach, coughs, spits and blinks the grit from his eyes and doesn't stand until a car comes rumbling into view.

This man has no wallet, no cell phone, no where to go. He wonders, for a brief moment, if he is still dead and his throat tightens and he cannot breathe until he leans over, puts his hands on his knees and closes his eyes and remembers _it's okay, it's okay, Sammy._)

* * *

Bobby still wakes up in the night thinking that he can't move, that his legs have been cut off at the knees and that he's going to bleed to death if he doesn't drag himself out of bed to the folded wheelchair leaning against the wall. This is when he stands, wiggles his toes, walks up and down the narrow hallways of his empty house over and over again until morning starts to peek through his dusty windows. He travels down the stairs, makes coffee and picks though old books. John Winchester's leather bound journal sits in the bottom drawer of his desk, and sometimes Bobby will take it out, but never opens it.

One day he takes the book to a room, the small one tucked away besides the upstairs study, and opens the door. This is the room that Bobby had sealed off for years after his wife died, because she was nearly four weeks pregnant when he stabbed her to death and here—here is where their child would have slept, if it had ever lived. The day John dropped his two boys off onto Bobby's front porch and drove away to a hunt without looking back, is the day that Bobby tore down the slab plywood he had nailed over the frame as Dean watched from the stairs with Sam half hidden behind him.

He leaves the journal on a pillow, fishes his cell phone out and calls Dean, then Lisa when there is no answer.

"He left."

"What?"

"Look, I don't know who you are but Dean… he's a mess. I can't-- he can't be around my son, not like he is now."

"Where did he go?"

"I don't know. I wanted him to stay in town, find an apartment, but…"

Bobby snaps the phone shut without saying goodbye, and scrubs a hand over his face.

* * *

Castiel returns to Paradise and is met with broken light and brittle faith, steps into a garden made up of withering plants and half dead things and listens to his brothers and sisters scream upon his entrance. They cluster towards him and tell that him he is not welcomed here, not anymore, and he is too bright to touch and they know what he is, but hold up their swords and do not care.

He stands and calmly waits for their outrage to fade, ignores Raphael's quiet advise to leave and tips up his chin. He spreads all twelve of his wings, thinks of Dean Winchester, and tells them all that they have a lot to fucking learn.

Raphael bows his head follows without complaint, but there is no trust between them. Castiel looks at him and knows from the bright simmer of his Grace that Raphael would relish the chance to tear him apart again, and considers for a moment inviting him to try, but restrains himself.

He speaks to his kin of free will, empathy, and the flaws of destiny. The angels who know what he's talking about turn away, disgusted, and the others, the ones that remind Castiel of what he once was, can't understand at all.

_Your mission is futile. Humanity has degraded you, brother,_ Raphael tells him afterwards. There is no insult to it, only fact, and Castiel doesn't have enough of a face to smile but his amusement is all there in the curl of his wings and warm light of his eyes.

_Maybe,_ he admits. _But I think I'm better for it._

Sometimes he travels to the ledge of Paradise and looks down, watches as the world rights itself slowly (tornadoes and earthquakes shuddering to a stop, sickness dwindling away over the weeks). No one understands, but some have suspicions and Castiel can hear their gratified prayers ricochet off the walls of Heaven.

Dean's voice is never among them, and Castiel isn't shocked by this, but feels strangely alone with the knowledge.

He is a servant to a God who has departed from Heaven and hides among the earth, who raised him twice from the dead for reasons he does not know and has given him the light of Lucifer and Michael both. He is a creature without humanity, but still remembers it, and he thinks that as he is now, he could erase it all if he wanted to. Burn it away and forget, because it's true--he's degraded, ruined, and doesn't belong here anymore.

Castiel knows this, and decides at that moment to carry the memory of Dean and Sam Winchester's small, flickering lives with him for the eternity of his existence.

* * *

Dean takes the Impala and drives, drives, drives until it feels like there is nothing but him and the stretch of the road and sky. He imagines his entire history trailing out behind him, of cutting it loose and leaving it to rot like a pile of road kill back at the intersection. He is travelling nowhere, only away, and doesn't stop for gas until his baby is barely sputtering along the side of the road.

When he sleeps it's in the seedy motels he has know all his life. He follows hunts on Sam's laptop but never seeks one of his own, and sometimes he feels like he's being watched. It's all there in the beat of his heart, the twitch of his fingers and the skittering feeling of nothing against the back of his neck. But when Dean turns and looks there is never anything there to greet him but empty space.

He calls Bobby, and lies.

"Are you okay?"

"Sure."

"You need a place to crash?"

"No."

"I'm going to call again in two days and you're going to pick up. You got that?"

"I got it."

"Promise me, boy."

"I promise."

When he hangs up he turns off his cell phone, and decides to leave it that way for a week.

That night Castiel appears to him in a dream as Jimmy Novak, even though he must have long disregarded that poor bastard of a meat suit by now (Dean thinks to ask what happened to him, but doesn't because he suspects the answer will not be a good one). They sit on a rickety bench, and watch children play on a jungle-gym across the park.

They don't bother saying hello, so Dean leans back, crosses his arms and tips his head up to look at the sky. Castiel is motionless beside him, but Dean knows he's still there.

After a long time, Dean says "Some happy ending this is."

"There's no such thing," Castiel replies, and there is, perhaps, sympathy in it. "There are only endings, Dean, and they are exactly what you make of them."

Dean wakes up cold and alone, lying on his back in the dark. He blinks and there is a shadow sliding across his window, the sound of gravel crunching beneath rubber soled shoes. He blinks again, and there is nothing, so he closes his eyes and can't bring himself to care.

* * *

Bobby knows that Dean is a man who looks to the future but cannot let go of the past. He carries everything that has ever happened to him like a weight in his chest and there is no relief, no rest, only burden after burden pulling him down until one day he will stop being able to get back up. Dean brushes it all away with a cocky grin or lude joke, squares his shoulders and thinks if he never acknowledges it then no one will see the cracks. But he is too full, has stretched himself too thin and cannot pull back together the pieces of who he's supposed to be.

Sam turned away from his past because he thought if he ran fast enough and far enough that he could leave it all behind and make the future his and no one else's to take and mould for him. He thought that if he lied and acted for his college friends and professors and lab partners that he could make all the false stories he told them true and he would be different, normal and unimportant. But Bobby was there when Sam was pulled back into where he came from and who he was, when Sam stood chanting Latin over the demon Meg who writhed and groaned against his words. Bobby thinks of Sam and is reminded of a man drowning, flailing to stay above the surface but only pulling himself further and further down.

Castiel… Castiel, Bobby thinks, is a creature of time itself. He is something instant and impatient because he knows each second that passes by intimately and how wasted they all are. He will always remember Castiel as looking desperate, angry and serious while standing in his living room with his back to the wall, watching the Winchesters pace as he itched to go, move, do something, but wouldn't because there was no plan and no direction for him to follow. Castiel is comforted by being led, and Bobby has watched Dean and then Sam chip away at him until he finally, _finally_, started taking the steps himself.

Bobby wants to believe in the now, but he thinks of is past and looks at his future and sometimes there is nothing there he wants to see. He is an old man who kills things that should already be dead, he is a widow and childless parent and most of the people he knows are hunters who have been eaten away by the Devil or the world itself. He escapes it by going outside and shooting bottles off of the fence post in the back, like he's done a hundred times before with Dean or Sam or even John fucking Winchester at his side.

He doesn't miss a single one.

* * *

Sam doesn't want to be a job anymore, doesn't want his brother to tangle himself up with his well being, to give everything to him and for him even though Dean has nothing left to offer. He wants a story-book finale, everything wrapped up in a bow. He wants Dean to live with his new family and think about him sometimes and be sad, but then to get up, kiss his wife and ruffle his adoptive son's hair and smile and maybe be able to forget for a little awhile.

Dean leaves Lisa, and Sam's story trembles apart.

He doesn't know why he's back, and he doesn't know what he is. He can travel to places only by thinking of them, move things without touching and see things that shouldn't be there, but are. One day he gathers himself up, breathes deep and looks at his reflection in the grimy mirror of a tuck stop. He his pale, his hair is long and greasy and there are lines on his face that weren't there before. He blinks, and feels the twist-flutter of his heart in his chest when his eyes don't bleed to black.

* * *

Castiel visits Dean when he is bent of the Impala, grease smeared across his shirt and wrist deep in her engine. Dean sees the tan coloured cloth of his trench coat from the corner of his eye, and snorts.

"Still wearing him around?" Dean says (can't help it), and Castiel leans against the side of the Impala, eyebrows raising and silent. Dean tells him pass over the screwdriver with a yellow handle, and Castiel does.

"They're going to leave," he says, and Dean nearly slams his head against the Impala's hood when he straightens.

"What?"

"The angels. Some of them don't feel like we belong here anymore, and I'm not going to stop them."

"Oh," Dean says. Swallows. "Are you going?"

"I don't know." Castiel turns to him, forehead crinkling as he frowns. He inclines his head, like he is curious, like Dean is doing something odd. "Are we friends, Dean?"

"What?" Dean says, choking on it. "Cas--" he grabs the lapels of his trench coat, curls his fingers in tight and doesn't know what he's doing anymore. "Yeah. Yes, you fucking moron--"

"Okay." Castiel touches his wrist for a moment, his voice softening into something that makes Dean afraid. "Okay, Dean." And he's gone, leaving Dean standing alone with nothing to hold on to.

"What? Wait, what does that mean? Cas you fucking asshole! _What does that mean?_"

* * *

An hour later Dean turns his phone back on, and when Bobby calls Dean answers and says very little, but when he asks if Dean wants to join him for a hunt --Poltergeist down in Boston-- he licks his lips, and says "Maybe."

* * *

Two hours after buying a new phone Sam receives a text message from a number consisted only of zeros that reads _go see your brother._

He stares at it for nearly fifteen seconds, messages back _who is this?_ and after sending he pauses, frowns, and texts _Cas?_

He doesn't receive a reply, so a day later he messages the same number with _what am I?_

He naps, wakes up, squints at his phone's tiny screen and reads the words _why does that matter?_

* * *

Dean knows that this isn't how it should be and doesn't understand how Sam ever thought he could let it all go, because Sam should have known that Dean has never been good at letting anything important slide away –-least of all people. He is sitting alone with a beer in his hand, looking at the sky but not the stars because it's too cloudy to see anything but black. Boston is four miles away, and Bobby's number glows bright on his cell phone, but Dean doesn't dial it and doesn't move. He thinks of getting back into the Impala and turning around, finding a bar or a pretty face, maybe going back to Lisa and doing a better job at pretending this time.

The colt sits in the glove box behind him, wrapped up carefully in a worn rag. Dean has the shells in the Impala's trunk, in a small box pushed near the back so anyone who wants them has to dig through rock salt and fake IDs and sawed of shot guns to get to them. He rolls the image of them around in his head, tells himself silently to knock it off, but can't.

The wind ruffles at his coat, feels cold against his face and bites into his naked hands and although there is no sound at all, he thinks that maybe --maybe, someone is standing behind him. Dean tips the last of his beer out onto the road, breathes, and stands up to meet them.

* * *

_(end)_


End file.
